16 September 2004

From a recent MSDN article on UI design comes this little quote:

“[…] We then discussed two types of UI designs—deductive and inductive. Generally speaking, the former puts the onus on the user to manage and learn a task, while the latter takes on the onus to guide the user through a task. The latter consequently turns out to be a great UI design choice for infrequently used tasks […]”

I think this is very interesting, because I’ve seen numerous examples where an inductive UI was used for frequently performed tasks. And while these UIs look very cool, they are really, really inefficient if you have to use them very often…